times. In ancient France and Spain the lawyer was a nobleman and this because he was expected to be noble and because the public nature of his calling demanded it. If this was deemed necessary in Europe, how infinitely more is it necessary in America.

We can raise the standards of our profession only by giving to its members a broad sense of social responsibility and by making them realize and enthuse over the great responsibility and opportunity which is theirs. We must make them really democratic and really loyal to the democratic trust. I do not know of any better training than that which is afforded in our colleges and universities. I am not in favor of putting barriers in the way of those who desire to study the law. In a country where everyone is presumed to know the law an opportunity to acquire that knowledge should be almost universal, but when we come to the right to practise it the matter is entirely different. The standards of admission to the bar cannot be too high and we need something more than legal knowledge. We need to inculcate honor and we need to teach responsibility. In this great evolving age, when we are questioning even the foundations of government, we need lawyers and judges who have read something more than the law books, we need men who are trained in history and economics and sociology and who know something not merely of the sciences and of the present day statutes, but of the great history of the race and of the struggles thru which it has passed. The reform of the law is in the lawyer. We can talk all we want to about reformed procedure but statutory reform can accomplish nothing. A shyster can delay litigation and violate human rights under any written code. Any well-trained lawyer who will really take the pains can draw a criminal indictment even under the common law but, as Judge Black once said, "If the public choose to admit to the bar and to elect as district attorneys, incompetent men, whose only qualifications are that they can shout long and loudly at the hustings, they should not complain if now and then a criminal indictment is quashed and the offender allowed to escape." Nine out of ten of the appeals in criminal cases would never have been necessary if the trial lawyer had been fair and sincere and honorable. We find district attorneys whose only idea is to make a reputation; to get a verdict from the jury is all that they want, and they often want that regardless of the guilt or innocence of the accused. They will crowd in evidence which they know is incompetent. They will ask questions that they know they have not the right to ask. They will propose instructions which they know are faulty. They will trick and not aid the trial judge.

The popular audience is in the trial courtroom and not in the supreme court and it is to the former proceedings that the press gives most space. If on appeal the judgments are reversed they swear at the supreme court and talk about technicality. A lawyer once told me, and he was allegedly an eminent one, that for over ten years he had done nothing but connive at error and then complain of it on appeal. Is it not true as man to man that if we would regain the popular respect which we have now lost that we must do all that we can to be worthy of it. Is it possible that these things could be if the idea were deeply rooted among us that the law was not a trade but a profession and that we are in fact as well as in name, officers of the court? Do we not need ideals? Now how are we going to get them? The answer is largely but not entirely in the colleges. I say in the colleges because there not merely do men acquire a knowledge of facts but they acquire ideals and a vision.

I have heard it said that there are three kinds of professors; one that teaches dancing, one that teaches swimming, and one that goes up in balloons. Many of them do go up in balloons. But after all, it is the idealist and the theorist of today who is the practical man of tomorrow and it is the idealist who thru the long centuries has moved the world. Men learn in the American colleges the real concepts of democracy.

Young in life, when the mind is fresh and free and the heart is generous they learn the great principles of cosmopolitan citizenship. So too, they delve into the history of the past and gain some conception of the purpose for which law and government were instituted among men.

Have you ever thought of the wonders of the Goss printing machine which prints and cuts and folds thousands of papers in a single hour? It is a wonderful piece of mechanism but it is something more than a machine. In it is contained, and from it can be learned, the story of civilization. The whole history of writing and of printing is in its keys. Back of it is the time when men scratched characters upon the bark of trees and traced them upon the tusks of animals. Back of it is the scroll and the papyrus. Back of it is the wooden press and the machine that was worked by hand. Back of it also is the heroism and the self-sacrifice of thousands of inventors who, one after another, added their little to the now perfected machine. Many of them died in poverty, and themselves gained nothing save the privilege of being able to open the way to others and to hand forward the torch of progress. In it are broken lives and back of it is the struggle of the race. So it is with our American

democracy, our American government and our American law. We have in our institutions and laws, not the work of a single day, but the struggles and ideals and the traditions of millions of men. Back of them is the suffering and the heroism of the centuries. A man cannot be a real lawyer-he cannot really understand our law-he cannot lead in the great social advance, unless he knows and understands these things. I know of no better place to learn than in the cosmopolitan American college.

Recent Social and Industrial Tend

IN

encies in the United States*

FRANK L. MCVEY,

President of the University of North Dakota

N the past decade a marked change has passed over the American people. Looking inwardly they have seen many things in a new light. Their attitude now is almost prayerful, and as a people they have entered into a period of questioning. Conscious of great advancement in the arts, and certain of amazing progress in the field of industrial organization, they are by no means so sure of themselves as they were twenty-five years ago.

This decade is rightly to be put down in the history of America as one of the great periods. It marks the beginning of a battle for a completer social and economic freedom, and has been well said to be a time of regulation and social awakening. In the past quarter of a century a notable increase in the diffusion of wealth among the masses, a bettering of the conditions of labor and the development of an increasingly independent and prosperous farming class have been brought about. As yet no great proletariat has recruited itself from a disappearing landed class. Progress has been made out of surplus and education has born fruit in a larger intelligence and a closer inspection of the basis and methods of government. There is no denying, however, that a plutocracy has arisen. At the top of the social structure is a great concentration of wealth, but the attitude which the people as a whole have taken at the present time stands out in strong contrast to the days when the captains of industry were extravagantly praised. Now a new social ideal has become one of the heritages of the Republic and the terms of everyday speech have included in themselves such phrases as social consciousness and money power. The country to-day is animated by more than a common devotion to ideals and the conceptions which the people have are not so much those of knowledge and of practise, as those of faith. Thru all the decades in which Americans have been face to face with innumerable practical questions there has without doubt been retained in the body of the people an elemental spiritual honesty, regardless of the opinion of foreign critics to the contrary and of the pessimistic views of our own hermit philosophers

This article is the second of two addresses given by President McVey at the University of Christiania, Norway, in September, 1912. The first, on The Evolution of America, is found in the Quarterly Journal of July, 1915, Vol. V, pp.287-299.-(Editor).

that this is a decadent age. In its essence the problem which faces America is to make the democracy of the fathers, so called, a reality.

The characteristics of the modern American can be traced back to the time of Elizabethan England. In the reign of that celebrated soveren England and America parted ways, and there was planted in the new world a type of character that has continued in the main since that time. It was the customary principle of the Puritans that life should be governed by ideal inspiration, which the conditions of life, such as the contact with nature, brought about in more than the usual way. It kept men simple and it helped maintain the ideals that they had established in the earlier day. They learned, too, the practical lesson that life cannot be conducted on abstract principles; hence their attitude was uncritical, but they possest at the same time an instinctive faith in their own integrity. To the initiated it does not seem peculiar that men should now busy themselves with the moral development of the nation in the light of the history of the past. It was natural that men should come to think that democracy consists in the dependence of the government upon the ballot box, and that this would be a sufficient means thru which control of legislation and administration by popular will could be firmly established. The growth of great wealth has consequently raised the problem of diverting anti-socially used wealth to the social account and of maintaining the economic and political independence of the average man without the control and direction of a plutocracy. Consequently, the problem of democracy in America as well as in England is economic in character. How to control colossal wealth, which in various ways threatens to strangle the public life, is the fundamental and essential question which now confronts the American. Markedly in contrast with this situation in the United States is that in England, where the problem is not one of control of wealth, but rather how to retard the extension of poverty. In America men look to the means of prevention; in England they hope to palliate by alms, old-age pensions, and accident insurance, and to prevent the burden and cost of industrial progress resting too heavily upon the poor.

The problem in America just outlined above is affected by several material influences. One is the interpretation of the law, another is the presence of the immigrant, and a third the deterring influences upon the family, as seen in divorce and in many other minor effects of a rather economic character that are found in the tariff, the parcels post question, the ownership of public utilities, and of the prohibition movement, of which the limitations of time prevent speaking. These